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Feb 28

X-Men/Fantastic Four #2 annotations

Posted on Friday, February 28, 2020 by Paul in Annotations

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.

PAGE 1 / COVER. Well, it’s some of the X-Men and some characters from the Fantastic Four, isn’t it?

PAGE 2. Recap.

PAGES 3-4. Cyclops tries to reassure the FF that the X-Men aren’t responsible for Franklin and Valeria’s disappearance.

Straightforward. Scott is trying to be as emollient as possible, short of departing from his mutant-nationalist line. His comment that Valeria doesn’t belong on Krakoa is meant to demonstrate that the X-Men wouldn’t have taken them both (and it’s a fair point in that context), but goes down predictably badly. This is the basic conflict set up in issue #1: the X-Men see their mutant separatism as a positive identity, the FF (Sue in particular) see it as divisive and supremacist. For her, the X-Men only care about what Franklin is, not who he is (and she has a point).

As in issue #1, Magneto doesn’t seem particularly disappointed by this. (Note that in his data page about mutants later on, Reed is actually much more sympathetic to the mutants’ desire for a homeland.)

PAGE 5. Recap and credits. This is “Broken Borders” by Chip Zdarsky, Terry Dodson, Rachel Dodson and Laura Martin (plus a couple of assistant inkers). Once again, the recap page talks as if Franklin is the only mutant who hasn’t been to Krakoa, but we’ll see later on that we’re not meant to take that literally.

PAGE 6. Sue continues to rail against the X-Men.

“Sabretooth has diplomatic immunity.” Referring to the FF’s scene with him in House of X #1. Obviously, the X-Men’s alliance with the likes of Sabretooth and Apocalypse is a rather more disturbing alarm bell than their trying (yet again) to set up a mutant nation.

PAGE 7. Dr Doom zaps Kate Pryde.

Self-explanatory.

PAGES 8-9. Kate wakes on “Doom Island”, a tropical island where Doom has brought the Latverian mutants to keep them “safe’.

Doom declares his plan to “help Franklin Richards be all that he can be.” He’s going to try and cure Franklin’s waning powers, just as he tried to cure Kitty’s intangibility problem in the original Fantastic Four/X-Men miniseries.

PAGE 10. A data page about the size of the mutant population. This gives us the clearest statement to date about the size of the mutant population (though this doesn’t come from the X-office so it should probably be seen as slightly second-order continuity).

According to Reed, there are around 200,000 mutants on Krakoa, plus another 10,000 still living in the rest of the world. Reed’s infographic isn’t very good – it shows the omega mutants separately, as if they were neither on Krakoa nor in the rest of the world. Anyway, this means that the global population of mutants is currently roughly the same size as Aberdeen. Of course, they’re supposed to be industriously reviving the many more mutants who died on Genosha, so it shouldn’t stay that way for long.

Reed has heard the term “Omega-level mutant’, and knows that Franklin is supposed to be one, but doesn’t know exactly what it involves.

PAGES 11-14. The FF attack the X-Men on Krakoa.

Let’s assume the FF’s suits shield them against the mutants’ early warning systems, psychic detection and so forth.

The Marauder has been dumped off the coast of Japan; Magneto makes a point of telling us that that’s not where it was sent on its mission. (Hardly surprising, if Franklin and Valeria sneaked aboard in New York.)

Scott and Emma are flirting openly, with Scott playing up to her dominant persona.

Note that nobody calls Kate by that name in this scene. Emma calls her “Katherine”, and Xavier calls her “Kitty”.

Magneto is unusually dim in this scene. It’s in character for him to be disdainful of the FF’s attitude, but not to underestimate them as opponents.

PAGES 15-16. Doom gives Franklin his sales pitch.

Doom is basically telling the truth about helping Kitty in the original series. He had ulterior motives – to get the X-Men in his debt, and to prove that he could solve a problem that had stumped Reed Richards – but he did genuinely try to help her. It didn’t go quite as smoothly as he makes out here, but Franklin will remember that, since he was there.

I haven’t read Fantastic Four: 4 Yancy Street #1, which is too recent to be on Marvel Unlimited.

PAGES 17-21. The FF fight the X-Men and escape with the co-ordinates for Doom’s Island.

Again, straightforward. The X-Men who show up to help take on the FF include Kwannon, but I wouldn’t read too much into that – it’s entirely possible that Dodson just picked Psylocke as a random X-Men and it was left in because it still works as Kwannon.

PAGE 22. Kate tells the Marauders that she’s cut a deal with Doom to help Franklin.

Kate, like Doom, is ignoring the FF/X-Men division and focussing on helping Franklin as an individual. She’s being awfully trusting towards Doom, but he did try to help her before.

Pyro definitely doesn’t have his tattoo, so either it’s an art error or he loses it at some point in the future. Kate’s costume in this series matches what she’s wearing in Wolverine #1, so the latter is currently looking more likely.

PAGES 23-24. Doom prepares for the inevitable arrival of the X-Men.

Doom is evidently expecting a horde of X-Men to come down on him, and has responded by building a ton of Doombot Sentinels.

Victorious is a established (though recent) Fantastic Four character. She’s basically a Doom loyalist who got a cosmic power-up from him.

PAGE 25. Trailer.

Bring on the comments

  1. Allan M says:

    I’ve read FF: 4 Yancy Street. MINOR SPOILERS:

    Basically, it’s revealed that Doom has a robot in disguise living near the FF’s new home on Yancy Street, which is performing surveillance on them. And consequently would’ve witnessed the dustup last issue.

  2. CJ says:

    Like last issue, I mainly enjoyed Sue pointing out how divisive the new status quo is, in-universe. Usually in these crossover battles, you have to force a dumb reason to come to blows, but not this time.

  3. Chris says:

    “he has a soft spot for us”

    Doom sent Franklin Richards to hell. A little boy to damnation.

    Sometimes selective continuity isn’t that bad a thing

  4. Luis Dantas says:

    I don’t know exactly why, but this issue, just like #1, is leaps and bounds above and beyond anything coming from the x-editorial when it comes to characterization.

    It is also far superior regarding actually answering questions that can’t really be avoided, such as how many mutants there are currently and how many of them are in fact in Krakoa.

  5. Luis Dantas says:

    And yes, trusting Doom to the extent that Valeria does is… creepy, as a matter of fact.

    Ironically, that makes it all that much more relatable. I for one kept having flashbacks of family dynamics that happened to be troubling to the point that I wanted to deny their existence outright.

  6. Luis Dantas says:

    Interesting that Wolverine is in his yellow-and-blues in the cover and in his autumn colors in the inside. This may be part of an effort at showing the Krakoans as more of a community that happens to like to wear bright spandex and less as a paramilitary force.

    Of course, Wolverine is hardly the ideal example for such a message, but I suppose that he is just that visible.

  7. neutrino says:

    Despite all the flak he got for preventing Franklin from using the Krakoan gates, after X-Men #7, Reed Richards was right.

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